Social Ontology

Social ontology is the study of the nature and properties of the
social world. It is concerned with analyzing the various entities in
the world that arise from social interaction.

A prominent topic in social ontology is the analysis of social groups.
Do social groups exist at all? If so, what sorts of entities are they,
and how are they created? Is a social group distinct from the
collection of people who are its members, and if so, how is it
different? What sorts of properties do social groups have? Can they
have beliefs or intentions? Can they perform actions? And if so, what
does it take for a group to believe, intend, or act?

Other entities investigated in social ontology include money,
corporations, institutions, property, social classes, races, genders,
artifacts, artworks, language, and law. It is difficult to delineate a
precise scope for the field (see
section 2.1).
In general, though, the entities explored in social ontology largely
overlap with those that social scientists work on. A good deal of the
work in social ontology takes place within the social sciences (see
sections 5.1–5.8).

Social ontology also addresses more basic questions about the nature
of the social world. One set of questions pertains to the
constituents, or building blocks, of social things in general. For
instance, some theories argue that social entities are built out of
the psychological states of individual people, while others argue that
they are built out of actions, and yet others that they are built out
of practices. Still other theories deny that a distinction can even be
made between the social and the non-social.

A different set of questions pertains to how social categories are
constructed or set up. Are social categories and kinds produced by our
attitudes? By our language? Are they produced by causal patterns? And
is there just one way social categories are set up, or are there many
varieties of social construction?

The term ‘social ontology’ has only come into wide
currency in recent years, but the nature of the social has been a
topic of inquiry since ancient Greece. As a whole, the field can be
understood as a branch of metaphysics, the general inquiry into the
nature of entities.

1. History

The following short discussion mentions some key themes and
innovations in the history of social ontology. For a more detailed
discussion of historical developments in social ontology as well as
references, see the supplementary document:
Social ontology: History.

1.1 Ancient and Early Modern Debates on the Sources of Social Entities

Ancient inquiries into the nature of social phenomena introduced
questions that remain active today: Which features of the world are
products of humans or society, and which are products of nature? What
does it mean to say that something is a social creation? A central
concern of Sophism, a school of Greek philosophy in the fifth century
BCE, was the contrast between nature (phusis) and custom,
law, habit, or convention (nomos). In particular, they
debated the sources of justice, law, and language: are these rooted in
phusis or in nomos?

Ancient philosophers explored the mix between natural and human
contributions in the construction of familiar features of the world.
They did not, however, theorize much about exactly what
people do in order to create the social world. Instead, they wrote of
agreements, compacts, conventions, habits, laws, customs, and so on,
without paying particular notice to separating these from one another.
In the early modern period, theories of these sources broadened
considerably, as did the variety of social phenomena being
investigated. Approaches developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries include:

Social entities as products of covenants: Hobbes, in
Leviathan (1651), argues that a stable commonwealth is generated by
covenants among all the people in a society. Hobbes’s analysis
is reflexive: the people who institute the commonwealth are those who
are members of the commonwealth. Hobbes analyzes covenants in terms of
agreements, and also provides an analysis of agreement, a crucial part
of which is to explain what makes agreements binding.

Social entities as products of convention: As an
alternative to ‘compact’ or ‘agreement,’ the
legal theorist Samuel Pufendorf, in De Officio Hominis et
Civis (1673), uses
the term ‘convention’ as the basis for law and language.
He argues that conventions do not need to be explicitly formed or
agreed to. Instead, we can have tacit conventions—i.e.,
conventions that we may not even be aware we have. Hume greatly
advances the analysis of convention and of social phenomena in terms
of it (Hume 1740). He expands the scope of convention to include a
wide variety of social entities—not only law, property, and
language, but also money, government, justice, and promises.

Social entities as products of God and Nature: Other
early modern philosophers root the social world in the
natural—both in divine commandment and in human nature. Robert
Filmer, a seventeenth century monarchist, argues in
Patriarcha (1680) that the state is a family. This implies, according to
Filmer, that state authority is no different from the authority of a
father over his family. Locke’s Two Treatises on
Government (1689)
sharply criticize Filmer and provide a competing analysis, though
Locke, too, sees God and nature as the sources of the state and of
property. Locke rejects Filmer’s comparison of the state with a
family, arguing instead that political authority has its source in the
natural rights of each individual created equally.

Social entities as products of the individual mind:
Locke’s theory of “nominal essence” is important for
a number of contemporary approaches to social ontology, even though
Locke does not himself associate nominal essences with the social
world in particular. A nominal essence is a definition of a species or
sort of thing, which people assemble in their minds out of ideas.
Individuals generate these definitions when they observe things in the
world and classify them according to their apparent similarities.
Nominal essences, in Locke’s approach, are generated
mentalistically: they are formed from the association of ideas in the
mind. Moreover, they are generated individualistically: a nominal
essence defined by any given person is fully defined by that
person’s own mental states.

In Locke’s work, we also see the foundations for a new inquiry
that blossomed in the eighteenth century—not into the
sources of social phenomena, but into their
constituents or building blocks. (See also sections
2.3,
3, and
4
for contemporary theories of constituents vs. sources of social
entities.)

1.2 Individuals, Aggregates, and Wholes

Advances in science and interest in political governance led theorists
to draw analogies between the traditional domains of
science—such as heavenly bodies, chemicals, and
organisms—and the newly salient domains of economies and
societies. The push to develop a science of society motivates a
different emphasis in social ontology, as compared to earlier
theories. Whereas ancient and early modern theorists largely
investigated the sources or generators of social entities, these
theorists devoted more attention to analyzing social entities into
their constituent parts.

Philosophers in the Scottish Enlightenment argue that social order
arises from aggregates of individuals interacting with one another,
even if the individuals did not plan the order. “Nations stumble
on establishments”, Ferguson 1767 writes, “which are
indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human
design”. Later attempts to develop a rigorous science of the
social world also employ a similar picture of the components of
society. J.S. Mill builds on Comte 1830–1842 to argue that
social science is a branch of psychology. Society, according to Mill,
is the aggregate of human minds, and the topic of the social sciences
is to derive laws governing such aggregates. (Mill 1843) Altogether,
his approach to social phenomena is “psychologistic”: he
takes social phenomena to be built exclusively out of psychological
states of individual people. (The interpretation and expansion of
psychologism becomes an important topic in twentieth century
individualism; see sections
3.1
and
3.2.)

The historicist tradition in eighteenth and nineteenth century German
philosophy inverts the relation between individuals and societies.
Rather than seeing individuals as primary, these philosophers stress
the primacy of societies, with individuals a product of the societies
in which they are brought up. Hegel argues that even
self-consciousness is not something that an individual can possess
independently of others. Instead, it depends on our having a sense of
ourselves as individuals as distinct from others, which in turn
depends on mutual interactions (Hegel 1807). Hegel also develops the
idea, following Hölderlin, of a “World-Soul” or
universal human spirit, of which individual actions are a
manifestation. Hegel’s universal spirit is sometimes used as an
example of “ontological holism”—i.e., the claim that
social entities are fundamental, independent, or autonomous entities,
as opposed to being derived from individuals or non-social
entities.

Nineteenth century criminologists, including Taine 1887, Ferri 1884,
Sighele 1891, and Le Bon 1895 investigated mental properties of
crowds, such as impetuousness and irrationality. Tarde 1890 postulated
mechanisms by which crowds acquire these characteristics, by way of
the psychology of individuals and interactions among people. Durkheim
1894 challenged these explanations, arguing that such individualistic
laws cannot be adequate to explain crowd psychology or other social
phenomena. Durkheim argues that “social facts” are
autonomous of individuals and have the power to constrain and affect
their actions. In social ontology, Tarde is often seen as a
representative of “individualism” and Durkheim of
“holism” regarding the social world, and their positions
remain a touchstone for contemporary debates (see
section 3).

1.3 The Construction of Social Categories

Nineteenth-century social criticism reopened the question of the
sources of social categories. Philosophers scrutinized commonplace
categories—often ones that we employ in our daily
practices—revealing that they have darker (or at least richer)
underpinnings than we realize. Their approaches raise questions about
the motivations for using these categories, as well as their nature
and metaphysical sources.

In a section of Capital titled “The Fetishism of
Commodities and the Secret Thereof”, Karl Marx argues that
certain social categories that might appear natural are in fact the
products of social and economic relations among people (Marx 1867).
Subsequent philosophers put claims of the constructedness of social
entities at the center of social critique. Lukács 1923 argues
that capitalism extensively “reifies” social
entities—that is, it turns phenomena that arise from an
oppressive economic system into features of the world that we regard
as natural.

Friedrich Nietzsche employs a historical or “genealogical”
method in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) to critique the basic
categories of Christian morality. Challenging the idea that this
morality is basic to human nature, he argues that prevailing moral
categories were tools intentionally wielded in a struggle for power.
Ideals of humility and self-denial, for instance, were introduced by
leaders of a resentful population to undermine the aristocratic values
of Greco-Roman society. In Nietzsche’s account, the sources of
such categories are largely cognitive and intentional, as opposed to
arising from material relations, as they do in Marx’s
account.

Members of the Frankfurt School, especially Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer, draw on Marx and Nietzsche to argue not just that the
social world becomes “second nature” to us, but that our
current social order is maintained, at least in part, by the causal
effects of our treating social entities and categories as if they were
natural (Adorno & Horkheimer 1947, Adorno 1966). Uncovering social
categories becomes a centerpiece of subsequent social criticism. If
oppressive structures are to be dismantled, the social nature of the
everyday world first needs to be revealed. The work of the Frankfurt
School in particular is influential in contemporary feminist and race
theory (see
section 5.4).

2. The Problem of Demarcating Social Ontology

2.1 Social Versus Non-Social

Social ontology is the study of social entities and
properties. But which things are social? How are they distinguished
from those that are not social? Not every theory in social ontology
needs to make this distinction—but many rely on it. Michael
Bratman, for instance, analyzes “shared intentions” of a
group in terms of the knowledge and intentions of individual members
of the group (Bratman 1993, 2014). His project is designed to remove
the mystery behind shared intention by analyzing it in terms of
non-social mental states of individual people. More generally,
“psychologistic” theories of the social world sharply
distinguish the social from the non-social. These
theories—descendants of Mill 1843—hold that all social
facts are determined by the psychological states of individual
people.

The “level of the social” is often divided from other
“lower levels” in arrangements of the sciences into
hierarchies (Comte 1830–1842, Oppenheim and Putnam 1958). This
arrangement of the sciences into levels is sometimes challenged
altogether (e.g., Wimsatt 1976, Thalos 2013). But even if certain
domains of science can be arranged into levels, the level of the
social has difficulties unique to it. One is the problem of
identifying just which entities are the social ones. Even cases that
would seem straightforward can be contentious. A crowd, for instance,
was regarded by many in the late nineteenth century as the
paradigmatic social object. But in recent years it has become less
obvious that this is so. Margaret Gilbert, for instance, hesitates to
attribute “sociality” to crowds: sociality, she argues,
arises from norms and commitments, which many crowds lack. According
to Gilbert, it is with joint commitment that a group is genuinely
social (Gilbert 1989). Other philosophers and sociologists make
alternative claims about the “mark of the social”, while
still others deny that there is any criterion for distinguishing the
social from the non-social (see Greenwood 1997).

A second problem is to identify which categories of social entities
are the best focus for analysis of the social world. Social theorists
have treated a variety of different categories of social entities as
basic, including social laws (Mill 1843, Spencer 1895);
social facts (Durkheim 1894, Mandelbaum 1955); social
groups (Oppenheim & Putnam 1958, Gilbert 1989, Tuomela 2013);
human kinds (Boyd 1991, 1999b; Millikan 1999, Mallon 2016); institutional
facts (Searle 1995); social objects and social
properties (Macdonald & Pettit 1981, Ruben 1985); social
predicates (Kincaid 1986); social practices (Bourdieu
1977, Giddens 1984, Schatzki 1996); and social processes
(Whitehead 1929, Rescher 2000, Livet & Nef 2009). Some theories
focus on a category because it is significant, but do not claim that
it comprehensively covers the social world. Others choose a category
of social entities in order to be comprehensive. In doing this, a
theory may aim to set up an exhaustive determination claim: for
instance, it may claim that all social objects are
composed of individual people interacting with one another,
or that all social properties supervene on individualistic
properties, or that all social facts are grounded by
physical facts. As these examples illustrate, the category of social
entities a theory focuses on is tied to how the theory interprets
“determination” (for more on this, see
section 2.3).

Even more contentious is which objects are not social. To
many theorists, individual people are paradigmatically non-social.
Many philosophers, however, argue that individuals are socially
constituted (see sections
1.2,
3.1.2, and the sections
A.3.2,
and
A.4.2 of the
supplement on the history of social ontology).
Thus some projects in social ontology look for a middle ground. They
intend to accommodate the social nature of individuals, and yet to
account fully for the social in terms of individuals (see
section 3.2.2).

One option for interpreting the “non-social entities” is
that they include only the objects of physics, chemistry, biology, and
other “hard sciences”. According to some theorists, even
these are socially constructed and therefore fall on the social side
of the division (Pickering 1984, Woolgar 1988). But even presuming
that objects of the “hard sciences” are non-social, they
may be inadequate for practical purposes as a characterization of the
set of non-social things. After all, social theory aims to say more
than merely that the social world is somehow built out of physical
entities (see
section 3.1.4).
A variety of approaches to the building blocks of the social are
discussed in
section 3.

2.2 Ontology Versus Causation

A second difficulty in analyzing social entities is in distinguishing
ontological from merely causal relations. In many cases, the
distinction is straightforward. The Battle of the Somme, for instance,
is part of World War I. That battle is not a cause of the war. It is a
constituent of it: the Battle of the Somme is ontologically rather
than causally related to World War I. The 1881 formation of the Triple
Alliance, on the other hand, is causally related to the war, not
ontologically.

Many cases, however, are less straightforward, and it is not always
easy to distinguish when entities stand in ontological rather than
causal relations. We could argue that the formation of the Triple
Alliance is only causally related to the war because it took place
long before the war began. But temporal remoteness is not always good
evidence. Even if causes must always precede their effects,
identifying causally related events is complicated by the fact that
events extend over long periods of time. (The weather in January 1916
is causally and not ontologically related to World War I, although the
war stretched on before and after that month.) Furthermore, there
might be instantaneous or even backward causation (see entry on
backward causation).

The more significant complication, however, is that ontological
relations need not be synchronic. For a mental state to be a
memory, for instance, it must be caused by the event of which
it is a memory. Likewise, a mark’s being a footprint
partly depends on historical events: it requires that the mark was
made by the strike of a foot (Dretske 1988, Stalnaker 1989). And for a
person to be President of the United States, an election must
have taken place beforehand. Some theories of the social world insist
that a social entity can only ontologically depend on synchronic facts
about the world. Classical structuralism, influenced by Saussure 1916,
regards social structures as synchronic, with the social structure at
time t being a product of the mental states of individuals at
time t (see
section 4.1).
John Searle’s theory of institutional facts (Searle 1995, 2010)
also regards social entities as being synchronically dependent: the
institutional facts at time t are a product of attitudes in the
community at time t together with a synchronic residue of
historical events that Searle calls the “background”. Work
in a variety of domains, however, argues for an ontological role of
historical factors. Among these are theories of semantic content
(Kripke 1972, Putnam 1975, Davidson 1987), biological and social kinds
(Millikan 1984), artworks (Levinson 1980), and artifacts (Bloom 1996,
Thomasson 2003).

Distinguishing causation from ontology does not imply that causal
relations are ontologically irrelevant. Having causal effects may be a
criterion for an entity to be real (Gellner 1956, Bhaskar 1975, Elder-Vass
2010). Causal structure is also often regarded as central to the
nature of various entities. Several theorists argue that
kinds are individuated by their causal roles (Fodor 1974,
Khalidi forthcoming). Some theorists of biological and artifactual
kinds regard patterns of reproduction to be part of what individuates
these kinds. And some theorists of human kinds regard certain causal
feedback loops to be characteristic of human kinds (see
section 4.3.3).
The burden of such accounts is to distinguish the causal factors that
are part of an account of ontology from those that are
“merely” causally connected.

For more discussion of the distinction between “causal”
and “constitutive” social construction, see Kukla 2000,
Haslanger 2003. Discussion of non-causal determination relations can
be found in the recent literature on “grounding” and
“ontological dependence”, including Rosen 2010, Audi 2012, Correia & Schnieder 2012, Fine 2012, Raven 2015, the entry on metaphysical grounding, and the entry on ontological dependence.

2.3 What is Meant by the “Building” of the Social World

As seen in
section 1
(and the supplement on history), it is useful to break social
ontology down into two broadly different inquiries. One inquiry is to
analyze the constituents or essential properties of
social entities. A second is to analyze the metaphysical
sources or generators of social kinds or
categories.

To illustrate the distinction, consider a category such as animal
sacrifice. This is a kind of ritual act performed in both
historical and contemporary cultures. The boundaries of this category
are not simple. Animal sacrifice is not the same as ritual slaughter,
though the two acts have many properties in common: the animals killed
in both may be eaten, both acts may be performed by specially
qualified individuals, and both may be subject to specific rules and
performed in specific contexts. The first inquiry into the nature of
animal sacrifice, then, is to clarify the conditions for something to
be in the category: what are the essential properties of an animal
sacrifice, or the constituents of an animal sacrifice?

Once this is settled, however, there is a second set of ontological
questions regarding the sources of the category animal
sacrifice. What features of the world—social, intellectual,
practical or otherwise—puts this category in place? What sets up
the category animal sacrifice to have the boundaries or
essential properties it does (as analyzed in the first inquiry)?

A task for each inquiry is to clarify the respective notion of
building.

2.3.1 “Building” in the inquiry into constituents

What is being claimed by a theorist who argues, as Bratman does, that
group intentions are “built out of” the attitudes of group
members? Or, as Dretske does, that footprints are “partly built
out of” a foot-strike? A social entity (a group intention or a
footprint) is held to stand in some relation R1 to other entities
(member attitudes or a past foot-strike). What is this relation
R1—and is there just one such relation, or are there many ways
that social entities are “built out of” their
constituents?

One of the more precise ways of clarifying claims about the building
of social entities is to use various forms of the supervenience
relation (see the entry on
supervenience).
A virtue of the supervenience relation is that it makes it easy to
articulate important distinctions in precise ways. For instance, maybe
the social properties of the U.S. Senate are exhaustively determined
by the properties of U.S. Senators. Or maybe the social properties of
the U.S. Senate are exhaustively determined by properties of the
population of the entire U.S., or even of the entire world, not just
by properties of Senators. This distinction can be clarified using the
notion of “global supervenience” (see Macdonald &
Pettit 1981, Currie 1984, Kincaid 1986, Epstein 2009). There are,
however, well-known shortcomings to the supervenience relation as well
(see Fine 2001, Shagrir 2002, K. Bennett 2004a, Correia 2005). People
interested in the building blocks of the social world often discuss
different relations apart from supervenience, including identity,
parthood, fusion, aggregation, set membership, constitution, and
grounding (see entry on
ontological dependence,
Copp 1984, Ruben 1985, Baker 2004, Sheehy 2006, Effingham 2010, List
& Pettit 2011).

2.3.2 “Building” in the inquiry into setting up social categories

The relation in the second inquiry is less discussed. Specific
theories of the setup of the social world include theories of
convention, law, collective acceptance, structure, practices, and more
(see
section 4).
A theory of law, for instance, may propose that certain lawmaking
systems are set up by specific beliefs and practices of members of the
society. Here, a set of social entities—legislative
systems—stand in some relation R2 to a set of other
entities—member beliefs and practices. Perhaps the R2 relation
(or relations) is the same as the R1 relation. Or perhaps it is
different; this topic remains little explored.

Epstein 2015 argues that R1 and R2 are the distinct
“grounding” and “anchoring” relations. On this
understanding, the topics discussed in
section 3
pertain to the grounding of social facts, and those discussed in
section 4
pertain to the anchoring of social categories and kinds.

Clarifying the “building relations” is part of
understanding the different roles that even a single kind of building
block can play in making the social world. Certain theories, for
instance, propose that social entities are built out of individual
people’s psychological states. But psychological states play a
different role in the first inquiry—see
section 3.1—than
they do in the second—see
section 4.1.

3. Constituents of the Social World

What are the parts of a crowd or of a corporation? What are the
necessary and sufficient conditions for an event to be an animal
sacrifice? What facts determine that Massachusetts is a state in the
United States?

Some theories strive to give very general answers to questions like
these. They aim to fill in for X in the formula: All social
entities are exhaustively determined by (or are constituted by, or
supervene on, or are grounded by, etc.) entities of type X. That
is, they argue for a particular “determination base” for
the social entities. A large class of theories fill in ‘X’
with strictly non-social entities. Others argue that this asks too
much: they agree that we can analyze constituents of social entities,
but deny that social entities decompose into non-social parts. Still
others reject the question altogether. And within all these views a
variety of positions are taken on what the “determination”
or building relation is (see
section 2.3).

Other theories make less ambitious claims. Instead of searching for an
exhaustive determination base for all social entities, they
focus on a particular subset of social entities. Or even more
modestly, they aim to analyze certain social entities in terms of
other social parts—such as a battalion in terms of platoons, or
an industry in terms of corporations.

Many positions on these matters descend from the debates between
individualism versus holism that took place in the early part of the
twentieth century (cf. O’Neill 1973, Udehn 2001, Zahle &
Collin 2014a). Individualism is the somewhat vague thesis that the
social is built exclusively out of individual people. Holism is the
even vaguer thesis that social entities are “sui generis”,
or ontologically fundamental in some sense. Some recent work aims to
clarify these (cf. List & Spiekermann 2013, Epstein 2014a, entry on
methodological holism in the social sciences),
while some rejects the terms of that debate.

3.1 Non-Social Building Blocks

Many theories aim to remove the mystery from the social world by
characterizing a non-social “determination base”: i.e., a
domain of non-social entities that exhaustively determines the social.
Some put forward a strong claim about the relation between the social
and the non-social: for instance, they claim that social entities are
reducible to some particular set of non-social entities (see
entry on
scientific reduction).
Others make weaker claims, such as that the set of social properties
globally supervenes (see
section 2.3)
on some set of non-social properties.

3.1.1 Psychologism

Psychologism is the view that social facts are composed exclusively
out of the psychological states of individual people. This is the view
advanced by Mill 1843 (see section
1.2
and also section
A.3.1 of the supplement
on the history of social ontology)
and endorsed by subsequent theorists of the “social mind”
such as Tarde 1898, 1901. Economists in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries also advocated psychologism (Jevons 1871,
Wicksteed 1910, Pareto 1916), as did mid-century social theorists
(Popper 1945, Watkins 1952). The term ‘psychologism’ is a
little confusing. Karl Popper, for instance, uses this word as a
pejorative regarding a particular kind of methodology in social
science. But when it comes to ontology, he endorses Mill’s view
(Popper 1945).

Most historical versions of psychologism are “internalist”
in that they regard the contents of mental states as depending only on
what is inside a person’s head. (“Externalist”
psychologism is discussed in
section 3.2.1.
For discussion of internalism versus externalism, see entry on
externalism about mental content.)

Psychologism is a claim about ontology; it is compatible with taking
psychological states to be caused by non-psychological
factors. Jane’s belief that the wind is blowing is caused in
part by the blowing of the wind. But her psychological state,
according to internalists, is a matter of her brain or other internal
states, and does not include the wind. According to psychologism, the
social world is determined exclusively by these internal psychological
states.

Versions of psychologism differ when it comes to whose
psychological states a given social entity or fact is determined
by or depends on. Some theories are “globally dependent”:
they take a fact like Gallius and Tiberius are slaves to
depend on the psychological states of a larger population, not just
those of Gallius and Tiberius (Currie 1984). Other theories are
“locally dependent”. Many theories of group attitudes
argue that the beliefs, intentions, and other attitudes of a given
group depend only on the attitudes of the members of that group
(Tuomela & Miller 1988, Bratman 1993, List & Pettit 2002).

Theories also differ when it comes to which psychological
states determine social entities or facts. The theories of group
attitudes just mentioned hold that group attitudes are determined not
just by psychological states in general, but by particular attitudes
on the part of members. Broader versions of psychologism (e.g.,
Mill’s) are less specific about which psychological states are
involved.

Finally, theories differ when it comes to which social
entities are determined by psychological states. Theories of
group attitudes, for instance, limit their claims to the group
attitudes alone. Other views, such as those of Mill and Popper,
propose that psychological states exhaustively determine social facts
in general.

3.1.2 Atomism

Social atomism (or atomistic individualism) holds
that the social world is built out of individual people understood as
isolated “atoms”. As Taylor 1985 points out, the term
‘atomism’ is mostly used by its enemies, so its
characterization often depends on what it is used to be a foil for.
But, typically, atomism is a combination of two claims: the view that
society is exclusively built out of individual people, and that
individual people are somehow isolated from one another, as opposed to
being mutually interdependent.

‘Atomism’ is taken fairly literally by theories that apply
the methods of statistical physics to society. The idea is to model
societies as large aggregates of people, much as liquids and gases are
aggregates of molecules, or ant colonies aggregates of ants.
Historical examples include Quetelet’s On the Social System
of 1848 and Spencer 1895.
Contemporary representatives include models in sociophysics and
econophysics (see Chakrabarti et al. 2007). The simplest of these
models take individual interactions to be governed by deterministic
rules, and take a society or market to be an aggregate of these
interacting individuals.

Some theories are accused of being atomistic in the sense that they
treat individuals as isolated and non-interacting. Neoclassical
economic theory is sometimes challenged on this basis; others point
out that even in basic neoclassical models relations among individuals
are incorporated in markets, prices, and other features (see Samuelson
1966, Arrow 1994).

The term ‘atomism’ is also used to indicate theories that
neglect the causal or historical influences of society on individuals.
A model may neglect social conditioning altogether, for instance by
treating individual preferences as exogenous or given parts of a
social model. Or, instead, people at a historical starting point may
be regarded as isolated or non-social. ‘Atomism’ in this
sense is applied to Hobbesian or “state or nature” views
that give an account of the development of society starting with
non-social individuals encountering one another (see Pettit 1993).

3.1.3 Bodies, actions, and resources

Theorists in several fields have turned away from mentalistic
treatments of the building blocks of the social. Psychologism
presupposed that the social sciences are sciences of the
“mind” or “psyche” of society. However, the
social sciences study not just social thoughts, but actions. This
suggests a different and larger determination-base for the
social—that is, a larger set of blocks out of which the social
world is built. After all, actions are not the same as thoughts or
behaviors, but involve the world.

Even behaviorism (Skinner 1953) rejects the idea that the social is
built out of internal psychological states. Instead, it argues that
only externally observable human behaviors can be the basis of a
scientific inquiry into the psychological and social sciences. Still,
behaviorism resembles psychologism more than it departs from it: it
replaces the internal states of minds with the “outputs”
of the mind in behavior, and takes the social to be exhaustively
determined by those outputs or behaviors (see entry on
behaviorism).

More recent theories depart from psychologism by introducing
additional entities into the determination base of social entities.
Kincaid 1986, for instance, claims that the social supervenes on
individualistic properties and relations and
actions. Other theories argue that among the constituents of the
social are also resources and other features of the world. For
instance, many microeconomic models include variables not only for
attributes of individual people, but also for bundles of resources
possessed by those people, or for such things as capital goods or
geographic locations. Another example is Edith Penrose’s
“resource theory” of the firm (Penrose 1959). Penrose
proposes that firms (corporations, partnerships, etc.) be understood
as collections of distinctive resources, including real estate,
capital goods, and material processes.

Despite such examples, it is often unclear whether such theories
genuinely take goods and resources to be ontologically
related to social entities. Or instead, whether they regard resources
to interact causally with social entities, but not to constitute them.
Moreover, even in models that include resources, often only individual
choices are modeled as having causal powers: resources have no causal
import except as mediated by the attitudes and actions of individuals.
Even Penrose’s theory of the firm focuses most of its attention
on “capabilities”, understood as knowledge and skills of
human actors, and subsequent literature derived from Penrose focuses
even more on capabilities as the exemplar of resources (e.g., Teece et
al. 1997).

A more unequivocal turn away from mentalism and toward the external
world in constituting social entities occurred in the 1980s in
sociology and anthropology. Theorists in these fields began to pay a
great deal of attention to how bodies cope in the practical
world, as discussed in
section 3.2
below.

3.1.4 Physicalism

The most prominent theories arguing for non-social building blocks of
the social are individualistic in either a narrow or broad sense.
Either the social is exhaustively determined by the psychological
states of individual people, or by these plus behaviors, bodies, and
actions, or by these plus resource bundles allocated to individuals.
An alternative is to reject individualism altogether, and instead
regard the determination base of the social to include (at least
potentially) any physical entities whatever (see Epstein 2009,
Hindriks 2013, Ylikoski 2014). Physicalism is often understood to be
the view that all facts—the social ones included—are
physical facts (see entry on
physicalism).

Physicalism—on this and related understandings—has
difficulties as well. First, even if it is true, it would be
surprising if this is all we can say about the facts that determine
the social ones. Physicalism seems at best a starting point in an
account of the ontology of the social. Some theorists have put forward
alternative approaches to stratification and hierarchy (Wimsatt 1976,
1994; Potochnik 2010; Potochnik & McGill 2012; Thalos 2013), and
Ylikoski 2014 does so for the social world. But these are largely
designed to make sense of levels of a sort in scientific methodology,
rather than to put forward claims about ontological determination.

Second, it is difficult to define physicalism, and in particular to
ensure that it is not trivial (see entry on
physicalism).
Clarifying the thesis of physicalism involves circumscribing what
counts as “physical”, just as individualism involves
clarifying what counts as “individualistic”. If the
physical entities are to be a non-social “base” that
exhaustively determines the social, then it is required that the
social not be included in that base. (See sections
3.2
and
3.3
on the separation of the social from the nonsocial.) Clarifying
physicalism likewise requires clarifying what dependence relation
various facts are taken to stand in, with regard to the physical. Are
social facts, for instance, taken to be physical facts? To supervene
on physical facts? To be exhaustively grounded by physical facts? (See
section 2.3.1
for analogous considerations in interpreting individualism.)

Third, it is unclear if physicalism is true. In fact, certain social
entities seem to be good candidates for counterexamples to at least
some versions of physicalism. One widely discussed problem with a
supervenience interpretation of physicalism, for instance, is the
“grounding” problem regarding the modal properties of
coinciding objects (K. Bennett 2004b). The classic example used to discuss coinciding objects
is an artwork—a statue—and the clay that constitutes it
(Gibbard 1975). Other social entities work equally well for the same
point, such as Gilbert’s cases of two distinct social groups
with the same members (Gilbert 1987) and Epstein’s extension of
such cases (Epstein 2015).

3.2 Socially Constituted Building Blocks

Many theorists in social ontology reject the approaches discussed in
section 3.1.
It is fruitless, they hold, to search for non-social building blocks
of the social world. That does not mean, however, that they renounce
analysis of the social altogether. Instead, they try to shed light on
the determination of the social in terms of other social
components.

Some of these projects make similar claims to the ones in the last
section. That is, they propose sets of entities that exhaustively
determine the social world—but they propose sets consisting of
social entities. Other projects are more modest. They aim at
partial accounts, rather than exhaustive ones. Just as one might break
a car down into chassis, engine, transmission, etc., one might break
social entities into mid-sized parts even if that breakdown is not
fully exhaustive, and even if those parts are not themselves
analyzed.

For those projects that do attempt to give an exhaustive analysis of
the social in terms of other social building blocks, a recurring worry
is whether they can avoid being circular. If we were trying to explain
the nature of water, it would hardly do to say that it is built out of
watery parts. Likewise, it is unclear what we have accomplished if we
argue that social entity x is ontologically determined by
social entity y, and then that y in turn is partly
ontologically determined by x.

3.2.1 Externalist psychologism

A variant of psychologism takes an externalist approach to mental
states. Externalism is the view that mental states ontologically
depend on facts about the external world. It holds that, for instance,
the content of a person’s concept of water partly depends on the
actual structure of samples of water in the person’s
environment; and likewise that the content of a person’s concept
of the U.S. Government partly depends on the external entity that is
the U.S. Government (see the entry on
externalism about mental content).

This version of psychologism regards the social to be exhaustively
determined by externalist mental states. Mid-century opponents of
standard psychologism (Mandelbaum 1955, Gellner 1956, Goldstein 1958) had raised the
problem of attitudes toward social entities, but it is not clear in
those views whether the external world was causally or constitutively
related to the mental states. Following Kripke 1972 and Putnam 1975,
the explicitly externalist view was developed by Bhargava 1992 and
Pettit 1993. Pettit argues for externalist psychologism as a qualified
version of individualism. Like more standard psychologism, he takes
social phenomena to be exhaustively determined by mental states. The
mental states in question, however, are partly constituted by external
stuff.

Externalist psychologism, if correct, would pare down the
determination base of the social world to one kind of (partly social)
entity. It faces hurdles, however. First, it must explain how it
avoids circularity—that is, social entities depend on attitudes
toward those entities that depend on the social entities themselves.
Second and more seriously, it needs to explain why this is a plausible
determination base for the social. According to this view, the
external world figures profoundly into the determination of the
social—but only when it is a constituent of attitudes.
Strangely, when the external world is not a constituent of attitudes,
it plays no role in the determination of the social.

3.2.2 Socially constituted individuals

Other theorists argue that people or selves are socially constituted.
Husserl argues that even the content of an individual’s sensory
perception is conditioned by the community of other conscious
individuals. A person’s subjectivity thus depends on
intersubjectivity (Husserl 1936: Sec. 71, 1950: Secs.
55–60).

A view like this—much like the externalist psychologism
discussed above—can be seen as individualistic in some sense.
Though it does not argue that the social world is determined by
non-social or pre-social individuals, it still holds that the social
is determined by individuals. Husserl, for one, argues that the social
world is the community of intersubjectively constituted
individuals.

Many views of the self as socially constituted implicitly equate the
self with the individual mind, consciousness, or mental states. Among
many others, Hegel argues that self-consciousness—and hence the
existence of the self—depends on recognition from others (see
section
1.2, and also section
A.3.2 of the supplement);
Scheler 1913 that the fundamental kind of experience is
experience-with-one-another; Mead 1913, 1934 that individual
experience and self-consciousness emerge from a social matrix of
communication processes; and Berger and Luckmann 1966 that individuals
are constituted by the social roles with which they identify.
MacIntyre 1984 argues that selves are constituted by social
narratives; Taylor 1989 that the self is constituted through the
participation in moral frameworks; and Davis 2003 develops a social
narrative theory of the individual in economics.

Other views focus on the social constitution of the body. Foucault
1976, 1977a and Butler
1988, 1990, 1993, among others, hold that an adequate theory of the
self involves the construction of bodies as much as it does the
construction of mental states. And they argue that human bodies are
largely products of discourse and the exercise of social power.
However, in interpreting these views it is important to distinguish
claims about the constituents of selves and bodies from
claims about how kinds and categories are set up. At least to
some extent, these are theories of how narratives and practices set up
categories for classifying bodies (see sections
4.4
and
5.4).

3.2.3 Partial and mixed analyses

To be useful, it is not necessary to provide a complete account of the
social world, nor to analyze social entities “all the way
down” to some fundamental level. It can also be illuminating
even to give a partial account of one particular social entity in
terms of others.

A certain type of hate-crime, for instance, might be usefully analyzed
as constituted in part by a speech act. That may be useful for social
science or law, whether or not we can say much about the nature of
speech acts. In economics, general equilibrium models are often
designed to represent sets of households (as opposed to individuals),
endowments of resources, sets of firms, goods, and other entities such
as bonds and governments (Mas-Colell et al. 1995: Ch. 19). In models
like these, some ontological work is implicitly done, in their partial
analysis of economic systems into components. It is also common in
sociological theory to analyze social entities into other social parts
(see section
5.3).

Popper and his students put forward a hybrid methodology for social
science, which favors individualistic explanations in a local context
or “situation”, but takes institutions as background
conditions that are treated as exogenous. This methodology is often
known as “institutional individualism” (Agassi 1975, J.S.
Coleman 1990, Jarvie 1998, Udehn 2001). This, however, is an approach
to methodology, not a claim about the nature of the social. These
models do not generally commit themselves to ontological claims either
about the nature of these entities or about which social entities the
various components constitute. Popper, for one, argues for the
indispensability of institutions in social explanation, but has a
psychologistic ontology of institutions (and all social entities).

3.2.4 Practices and embodied agency

Theories of practice, developed in anthropology in the 1970s and
1980s, turn their attention to actions, routines, and the engagement
of people with the world. A range of theories are now classified under
the broad rubric of “theories of practice”: Bourdieu 1977
and Giddens 1984 are the most prominent, but theorists as diverse as
Foucault, Garfinkel, Butler, Latour, Taylor, Ortner, and Schatzki are
also counted among the practice theorists.

A practice is a “way of doing” some activity, involving
how people in a culture not only think, but also behave, speak, feel,
and interact with objects in the environment. Consider, for instance,
a way of cooking in a given culture. Cooking involves bodily movements
that individuals reproduce, objects in the environment that
individuals handle in routine ways, explicit and background knowledge,
and people’s intentions and choices. Individuals, according to
practice theory, are always involved in the performance of practices,
but those performances are not limited to the bodies and minds of the
performing individuals. Bourdieu 1990 takes practices to be
exhaustively determined by sets of objectively observable behaviors.
But other theories argue for the primacy of the “type”
over the “token”: it does not make sense to say that a
practice supervenes on its performances, since the performances are
individuated by reference to the practice.

Some theories of practice are, to a certain extent, individualistic.
Practice theory is largely concerned with bodily activity—the
ways people move, carry themselves, and act skillfully—as it is
reproduced in a culture. Individual agents are the
“carriers” of practices (Reckwitz 2002, Rouse 2007).
Still, practices involve not only attitudes and mental
representations, but also objects in the world: pans, stoves,
vegetables, and sauces are among the constituents of cooking
practices. Moreover, individual activities themselves depend on the
social: they are partly constituted by the cultural practices of which
they are instances.

3.3 Top-Down and Flat Approaches

Although it is common to distinguish individualism and holism as the
two poles in debates over social ontology, the range of views
discussed in sections
3.1
and
3.2
show that individualism is not the only alternative to holism. Even
among those in 3.1—ones that take the social to be built out of
non-social components—there are both individualistic and
non-individualistic alternatives to holism.

“Holism” too is diverse. Some theories are dualist: they
propose separate spheres of the individualistic and the social, akin
to the Cartesian distinction between bodies and mind. Others are
monist: they take the social to be fundamental or to have ontological
priority. Still other theories put forward a “flat”
ontology, according to which entities of all kinds exist and yet stand
in no ontological priority with respect to one another.

3.3.1 Dualism

Dualism about the social is the view that social and non-social
entities—such as societies and individuals, or structures and
agents—are distinct, and neither is grounded in the other. In
the mid-twentieth-century individualism/holism debates (see Jarvie
1972, O’Neill 1973), holists were widely understood as endorsing
versions of dualism. In those debates, defenders of holism did not
deny the existence of the non-social. Instead, they argued that the
social cannot be reduced to individualistic entities.

Work on the relation between minds and bodies strongly influences
arguments about social dualism. In particular, many philosophers of
social science have adopted anti-dualist strategies pioneered by
philosophers of mind, especially the “non-reductive
physicalism” developed by Davidson, Putnam, Fodor, Kim, and
others. As applied to minds, this is the view that there may be
in-principle obstacles to reducing mental properties or facts to
physical properties or facts, even though the mental is exhaustively
determined by the physical. Philosophers of the social sciences
applied this to social entities in the form of “non-reductive
individualism”. There may be obstacles, this view holds, to the
reduction of social phenomena to individualistic ones, even though the
social is exhaustively determined by the individualistic (Macdonald
& Pettit 1981; Mellor 1982; Currie 1984; Kincaid 1986, 1997, 1998;
Tuomela 1989; Little 1991; Bhargava 1992; Pettit 1993, 2003; Hoover
1995, 2001a, 2009;
Stalnaker 1996; Sawyer 2002, 2005; Schmitt 2003a; List &
Spiekermann 2013). More recently, some philosophers have challenged
these arguments as inadequately characterizing the
“supervenience base” (see sections
3.1.3
and
3.1.4).
These philosophers agree with the basic strategy for denying dualism.
But they deny that the “individualistic” is the proper way
to understand the building blocks of the social, arguing instead for a
broader set of building blocks.

Dualism has seen a resurgence among some philosophers of mind, e.g.,
Chalmers 1996. It is not clear, however, that the sorts of argument
marshalled in favor of mental dualism could apply to social dualism.
For instance, even if Chalmers’ “zombie” argument
succeeds for minds, there may not be a social analogue to the
“hard problem of consciousness” (see entry on
zombies).

3.3.2 Ontological priority of the social

A different version of social holism is monist rather than dualist.
Instead of postulating two or more spheres of substances—social
and non-social—this version regards social entities to be
ontologically prior or fundamental, and individual people (and other
entities) to be ontologically derivative on the social. This sort of
monism is often associated with Hegel (see
section A.3.2 of the supplement)
and the British idealists, such as Green 1866 and Bradley 1893.

Some mid-century social theories also seem to take this position.
Classical structuralism emphasizes the priority of structure over the
individual, following Saussure’s arguments for the ontological
priority of the linguistic system over the individual sign (1916). In
its initial applications to anthropology, roles in a cultural system
were analyzed in terms of the system as a whole. By the 1960s,
however, the point was applied not just to roles but to individuals
themselves. Althusser 1965 and Balibar 1965, for instance, argue for a
“theoretical anti-humanism” in which causal explanation is
predominantly structural:

Men only appear in the theory as supports for the relationships
implied in the structure, and the forms of their individuality only
appear as the determined effects of the structure. (Balibar 1965)

The functionalist sociology of Talcott Parsons (1951) also prioritizes
social structure over individual agency. Parsons is often understood
as arguing that individual action is little more than a manifestation
of social functions, and is severely criticized (e.g., by Garfinkel
1967) on the grounds that he inappropriately discounts individual
agency. It is not always clear, however, whether the explanatory
priority of the social over the individual entails a claim about
ontological priority. Functional systems, even ones that strip
individuals of their freedom to act independently, may nonetheless be
exhaustively grounded in “low-level” entities.

3.3.3 Flat ontologies

Other approaches reject any ordering or hierarchy of entities
altogether. Some views deny that the sciences can be divided into
hierarchies, but allow that certain entities are composed of others. A
more radical view is that there is no building at all among entities.
A prominent example is Actor-Network Theory (Latour 2005, Callon 1999,
Law 2009). All entities, in this approach, are potentially on a par
with one another. Even identifying an entity or a class of things as
“social” is a mistake, according to Latour. Latour
distinguishes certain roles that objects can play: they can act as
“mediators”, transforming meaning, and they can act as
“intermediaries”, transmitting meaning without
transforming it. An atom, a person, a machine, a mountain, or a bank,
have equal potential to play these roles. All the
scientist—social or natural—can do is to write narratives
that trace associations. Other approaches to flat ontology include
“assemblage theory” (DeLanda 2006), “object-oriented
ontology” (Harman 2005), and “scale-free
metaphysics” (Thalos 2013).

4. How Social Categories and Kinds Are Set Up

Inquiry into the constituents or “stuff” of the social
world, discussed in the last section, is a huge field. But there is
another field of inquiry with an array of approaches in social
ontology: the inquiry into how social categories or kinds are set up.
Consider, for instance, the fact Kanye and Kim are dancing the
cha-cha. The “stuff” of the dance is the two people
moving around in some pattern. But, we might ask, what sets up the
category cha-cha? Why do the moves determine what dance it
is, rather than the material of floor they are dancing on or the brand
of shoes they are wearing? What makes it the case that dances are
categorized into cha-chas versus sambas versus salsas; or, for that
matter, certain sequences of movement into dances versus strolls
versus marches?

Here are a few options one might start with:

A crude mentalistic theory: the fact that the dance is a cha-cha
is a product of the fact that I believe it is a cha-cha.

A crude naturalistic theory: social categories are natural
features of reality, with the physical structure of the world breaking
reality down into categories, one of which is the cha-cha.

A crude linguistic theory: we define the word
‘cha-cha’, and that definition specifies the conditions
for an entity to be a cha-cha.

The following sections discuss more developed views taking off from
these ideas.
Section 4.1
discusses theories that are both mentalistic and
individualistic: i.e., those holding that the metaphysical source
of a person’s social categories is that person’s own
mental states.
Section 4.2
discusses mentalistic theories that involve many or all the mental
states of people in a community, rather than each person for herself.
Section 4.3
discusses theories that regard social categories to be set up by
patterns of properties and causes.
Section 4.4
discusses theories that include practices in setting up social
categories, and
section 4.5
discusses pluralistic and heterogeneous theories.
Section 4.6
discusses the potential roles for language in setting up social
categories.

Importantly, any given theory of the source of social categories can
take different positions on the topics discussed in
section 3—i.e.,
on what the constituents or building blocks of social entities are. A
set of theorists might disagree about how cha-chas (or other social
entities, or entities in general) are constituted—e.g.,
by people, or patterns, or physical configurations of atoms, or
sensible particulars, or impressions, etc. And yet all might agree
that a person’s categories are set up by that
person’s own mental states (compare, for instance, Berkeley
1710, Russell 1929, and Dennett 1991). Conversely, a set of theorists
might all agree on how cha-chas are constituted, yet disagree on what
metaphysically sets up that category.

4.1 Social Categories as a Product of Each Person’s Own Mental States

Many philosophical traditions investigate how individuals mentally
construct, organize, categorize, or represent social objects—and
objects more generally. Some views regard social categories to be
concepts that individual minds assemble in order to organize
subjective impressions. An example is a Lockean “nominal
essence” theory of social categories (see
section A.2.4 of the supplement).
In this theory, a given person’s social category
cha-cha is an idea in that person’s mind, formed out of
combinations of impressions or other ideas internal to that
person’s mind.

At least until the middle of the twentieth century, the
individualistic-and-mentalistic theories were the prevailing
approaches to the setup of the social world. These theories come in
staggering variety. Even classical structuralism in anthropology
(e.g., Lévi-Strauss 1945, 1963) falls into this class, holding
that structures are unconscious sets of mental states. This brand of
structuralism has an individualistic rather than a distributed theory
of how structure determines a person’s social categories: each
person, according to Lévi-Strauss, has a mental structure that
determines his or her own social categories. Later versions of
structuralism reject this individualistic treatment of structure.

To organize the class of individualistic-and-mentalistic theories, we
might distinguish the positions they take with respect to dimensions
such as the following:

The extent to which social categories differ from person to
person: We seem to live in a single world, to have attitudes
about the same objects and propositions as one another, and to
communicate about them. Are categories shared among people in a
culture, between cultures, or universally? Intersubjectivity and
objectivity are acute problems for mentalistic theories of social
categories. In certain views, each person’s private
“conceptual scheme” may differ in subtle or stark ways
from the schemes of others. Some hold that conceptual schemes may be
similar among members of a community, as a result of collaboration and
causal feedback, but never identical. Alternatively, conceptual
schemes and social categories may be less fine-grained, so that
differences in people’s mental states may not yield differences
in their categories (cf. Mach 1886, Natorp 1888, Cassirer 1910, Quine
1960, Foucault 1966 [1970]).

How integrated a person’s category-determining mental
states are: Quine 1951 argues that our beliefs about the world
are interconnected with one another, and that no belief can be
assessed against our experience of the world on its own, in isolation
from our other beliefs. Each person, according to Quine, forms a
“web of belief” by systematizing the stimuli the person
receives from the world. A person’s ontological categories are a
product of that network, and any change to the network affects the
network as a whole. Other approaches to the mentalistic construction
of social categories are more piecemeal, with the determination of
each category ontologically independent of one another.

How a person’s social categories are related to that
person’s concepts: Many theories of categorization in
psychology (see Cohen & Lefebvre 2005) treat a person’s
concepts interchangeably with the categories that person imposes on
the world. The so-called internalist versions of these theories take a
person’s concepts to ontologically depend on states of the
person’s brain alone. These theories take a person’s
social categories to be the same as her concepts, which are internal
mental states. Other mentalistic theories of social categories do not
fit this mold. It may be that a person’s social categories are
generated by that person’s mental states, without the categories
having to be conceptualized.

Whether the mind “organizes” the world:
Mentalistic theories of how social categories are set up often
implicitly draw on a picture of the mind as “organizing”
the content that is “given” to it by the senses. Sellars
1956 and Davidson 1973 criticize this picture, denying that there is
any such “given”. Davidson rejects the distinction between
“scheme” and “content”, arguing that it is
incoherent to hold that different people, or people in different
cultures, have different “conceptual schemes”. In
response, one might defend the scheme/content distinction, or else
turn to a less mentalistic picture of the determination of categories
(see
section 4.4).
Still other views—such as various forms of idealism—take
a mentalistic view of the setup of social categories without endorsing
a scheme/content distinction.

Whether and how category-determining mental states are
constrained: Theories inspired by structural linguistics
(Saussure 1916, Jakobson 1931, Chomsky 1965) hold that the mind limits
the possible variations among categories, and that a person’s
categories are linked with one another. According to
Lévi-Strauss, kinship structures are governed by universal
rules, so only a limited number of forms of kinship are human
possibilities (Lévi-Strauss 1945). Some recent psychological
theories of categorization see humans as having specialized neural
circuits for processing different categories of objects (see Carey
& Spelke 1994,
Capitani et al. 2003,
Mahon & Caramazza 2009). Other theories propose constraints on the mechanisms by
which categories are constructed by the mind (Kant 1781/1787, Cohen 1871). Still other
theorists regard the mental construction of social categories to
involve generic mental processes (Piaget 1926, Mandler 2004).

4.2 Social Categories as a Product of Community-Wide Mental States

Instead of taking social categories to be products of individual
minds, another class of theories holds that they are the products of
the minds in a community taken together. Hume 1740 argues that
promises are a product of a social convention. We have a convention,
according to Hume, of the following form: words uttered according to a
certain formula incur an obligation. When someone utters a phrase of
the form ‘I promise to S’, the speaker is obligated
to perform S. According to this theory, the conditions for an
utterance to be a promise are set up by beliefs and expectations of
the members of the community at large.

Theories in this broad class take different approaches to how
community mental states set up social categories.

4.2.1 Social categories set up by agreement

Agreement, according to some historical theories, is the source of
law, language, and the state (see section
1.1, and
also sections A.1 and
A.2.1 of the supplement).
Agreement still plays a role in contemporary theories of some social
phenomena, but that role is typically to ground the obligations
associated with phenomena. For instance, according to the “will
theory of contract”, contractual obligations are grounded by the
intentional choices of each party to be bound to a commitment (see
Fried 1981, Barnett 1985). When it comes to setting up social
categories, it seems less likely that actual agreements are available
to be their metaphysical sources. Instead, even theories that are
putatively agreement-based tend to place agreement in a different
role. Gauthier 1986, for instance, advances an agreement-based theory
of morality. By his account, however, the justification for moral
claims is based on what people rationally would agree to:
idealized agreements, rather than actual ones, serve as the basis for
moral categories.

Another difficulty—even if a given social category is the
product of agreement—is identifying which feature of an
agreement does the “metaphysical labor” in setting up the
category. Suppose we employ a social category at time t′
which was a product of an agreement at time t. It may be that
the features of that category are a product of the mental states of
participants at t, or of the utterances or acts of participants
at t. Or perhaps what matters is the mental states of community
members at t′: that is, it is the synchronic trace of the
agreement that sets up the social categories in a community at
t, not the agreement itself.

To say that a social phenomenon is “conventional”
sometimes means little more than that it is social, or that something
about the phenomenon is arbitrary, or a matter of choice. In social
ontology, however, conventionalist theories are understood more
precisely, following variants of David Lewis’s 1969 analysis of
convention, or else following analyses of convention that challenge
Lewis’s approach.

Lewis argues that conventions are solutions to coordination problems.
In interactive situations that have more than one
equilibrium—for instance, where it is rational for us all to
drive on the left or for us all to drive on the
right—conventions resolve the question of which actions to
choose. In his analysis, convention does not require explicit or tacit
agreement, but instead involves the possession of various attitudes by
members of the community, including beliefs, knowledge, expectations,
and preferences (see the entry on
convention).

Among the critiques of Lewis-style conventionalist theories are: that
many social phenomena do not appear to be solutions to coordination
problems; that they are excessively mentalistic, involving a complex
structure of beliefs, knowledge, expectations, and preferences of the
population; and that they regard conventions as regularities in
behavior having certain characteristics, so the analysis rules out as
conventions anything that is not exemplified in behavioral regularity
(see Burge 1975, Millikan 2005). The critiques, however, are
complicated by the malleability of the notion of convention: it is not
clear whether these should be regarded as difficulties for
conventionalism or for Lewis’ analysis.

4.2.3 Collective attitudes and dispositions

Another prominent set of approaches is closely related to
conventionalism, but instead of appealing to structures of individual
attitudes, these approaches take the social world to be set up by
collective attitudes and dispositions. (Some, though not all,
of these accounts go on to analyze collective attitudes in terms of
individual attitudes. See
section 5.2.)

Hart (1961) proposes a sociological basis for certain kinds of
rules—in particular, the rule regarding how valid laws are made
in a society. A rule R, for Hart, is a rule in a society
if two requirements hold: that members of the society behave in
conformance to R, and that members of the society accept
R as a standard of behavior in the society.

Searle (1995, 2010) proposes a theory of those social facts he calls
“institutional facts”. He modifies a Hart-style approach
in three ways. First, he augments Hart’s account of what it
takes for members of a society to accept a rule: he argues that the
community must collectively accept the rule (see
5.2
on collective attitudes). Second, he does not require that rules be
implemented in behavior: institutional facts depend only on mental
states in a society, not on practices. Third, he argues that the
“constitutive rules” for institutional facts all share a
common form: they involve a certain kind of status assigned to objects
in the world. The general form of constitutive rules, according to
Searle, is “X counts as Y in context
C”. An object X counts as having the status or
symbolic function of Y in the context of a community. For
example: a line of stones (X) counts as having the status
of functioning as a border wall (Y) in a village
(C). Another example: a piece of paper issued by the
Bureau of Engraving and Printing (X) counts as having the
status of functioning as money (Y) in the United States
(C). Among the institutional facts, according to Searle,
are social categories such as money, borders, cocktail parties, and
public offices. Tuomela (2002) advances a related collective
acceptance theory of social entities.

Ásta Sveinsdóttir (2008, 2010, 2013) also regards many
social properties to be a product of collective attitudes, but in a
weaker sense than Searle. A social property is “conferred”
on an object, according to Ásta, if the object has the property
because of some attitudes of people. A baseball umpire, for instance,
confers the property of being a strike on certain pitches. Many
properties, Ásta argues, should not be understood as being
conferred by actual beliefs or acceptances of community members.
Instead, conferrals should be understood in terms of ideal versions of
community members. At bottom, she understands conferrals to be a
product of community dispositions: i.e., how members are disposed to
use concepts in counterfactual situations.

4.2.4 Other mental states

Other approaches also see social categories as being set up by the
distributed mental states of members of a society. Many of these
theories are less specific about the particular states that
individuals must be in. Husserl (1936, 1950) argues that how an
individual represents an object depends, in part, on the
presupposition that others are representing it as well. Individual
empathy for the representations of others plays a part in how the
individual herself constructs representations. The representations of
objects in a society, therefore, are a product of harmonized mental
states among its members. But these mental states are not required to
be attitudes or dispositions. Other theorists associate different
mental characteristics with structuring social categories. Berger and
Luckmann (1966), for instance, regard the identification of people in
a society with social roles as central to the characteristics of those
roles.

4.3 Pattern Theories

Mentalistic theories of social categories, whether individualistic or
social, are sometimes criticized for overly fictionalizing the social
world. Some philosophers emphasize that social categories are
routinely used in the social sciences: the categories support
inductive inferences, can be assessed statistically, and have causal
effects. Such theorists argue that social categories are “real
kinds” in the world, much like water and gold are “natural
kinds”. Some deny the distinction between social kinds and
natural kinds altogether, even while seeking to retain a role for
people in setting up social categories. Instead of regarding social
kinds to be generated principally by mental states that we overlay on
the world, they treat social kinds as products of patterns—often
patterns of causes and effects—in the world.

4.3.1 Functional roles and realizers

Functionalism in social theory is predominantly an approach to social
explanation, providing causal accounts for the existence and
maintenance of social entities in terms of the functions they serve
for society. Some functionalist theories also make ontological claims,
arguing that the nature of social entities involves their
functions.

A common theme in functionalism is that people are often unaware of
the functions that their own activities perform. Merton (1957)
distinguishes the “latent” functions of an activity from
its “manifest” functions. In many contemporary societies,
for instance, people choose whom to marry on the basis of strong
romantic attachments. One function of this practice is the manifest
function of promoting happy long-term relationships. This motivates
individuals to marry for love. But, Merton argues, the practice also
has an underlying goal (the latent function): to minimize the role of
family in the selection of a mate, thus leading to a kinship structure
with many marriages that join individuals from different communities.
Functionalists, then, often disagree with theories that treat social
phenomena as cognitively transparent to members of a society.

A function may figure into the ontology of a social kind K in any of
several ways. The simplest is for K to be defined by a causal
role R that its instances perform. In that case, K is a “causal
role kind”. Take, for instance, the role serving to minimize
the role of family in selecting a mate. Alternatively, certain
social categories may better be understood as realizers of
functional roles. A realizer-kind is often defined in terms of process
or physical characteristics, where things that have those
characteristics normally perform a role (see Block 1980, McLaughlin
2006).

As analyses of social functional kinds, both role-kinds and
realizer-kinds have shortcomings. In particular, they miss out on the
normative character of functions. Cummins (1975) analyzes functions in
terms of the capacities of the components of a system to contribute to
a capacity of a larger system. On his account, the function that an
entity plays is sensitive to the context of the larger system in which
it is embedded. Social kinds, then, may arise from components of
social systems having particular Cummins-functions.

4.3.2 Teleofunctions and tokens

Millikan (1984) proposes a different approach to functional kinds,
arguing that they arise from the successive copying or reproduction of
new objects from older ones. A population of objects copied in the
right way, and copied because they perform a function, form a
“reproductively established family”. Millikan (1999, 2005)
applies this account to linguistic and social kinds as well as
biological ones. Millikan also analyzes social convention in terms of
reproductively established families, and other theorists have recently
applied her theory to artifacts (see
section 5.5).

A significant contribution of Millikan’s approach is the
constitutive role of particular tokens in the world in setting up the
kinds of which they are members. In her approach, the kind
marriage is partly set up by millions of particular marriages
copied one from another in a reproductively established family.
Particular marriages—the actual members of the kind—figure
into setting up the kind marriage to have the membership
conditions it does. Contrast this with a mentalistic account of the
kind marriage. According to that sort of theory, particular
marriages are members of the kind, and may play a causal role in
triggering people to have certain attitudes. But it is the attitudes
that define the kind; the tokens do not play an ontological role. Thus
Millikan proposes a more “world-involving” and less
mentalistic theory of how kinds are set up. Also see Burge 1986 for a
similar insight.

4.3.3 Causal loops

Systems theorists in the 1940s and 1950s began to investigate feedback
mechanisms of regulation and control, such as electronic circuits that
loop their outputs back into their inputs in order to arrive at a
stable equilibrium. Wiener (1948, 1950) applies this
“cybernetics” to social systems, as do Mead et al.
1950–1956, Parsons 1951, Ashby 1956. Bateson (1972) elaborates
these applications, describing social systems as involving
homeostasis, i.e., mechanisms that self-correct to stabilize their
properties.

Boyd (1999a) applies
homeostasis to the analysis of kinds, both natural and social.
According to Boyd, kinds are clusters of entities that stably have
similar properties, with these similarities sustained by a causal
homeostatic mechanism. Marriage, for instance, is a kind because there
are many particular entities with similar properties (such as being
formed by ceremonies, involving couples paired up, and so on), and
because there are mechanisms causing entities to have and keep these
properties. Like Millikan, Boyd argues that kinds are a product of
actual tokens in the world and the causal processes in which those
tokens are involved. Since his account involves actual causal patterns
over time, kinds are historical, but they do not need to involve
functional roles or evolution.

Hacking (1995) employs feedback mechanisms in a different way: rather
than emphasizing stability, he regards causal change to be
characteristic of “human kinds”. Hacking argues that human
kinds are generated through histories of causal loops, in which
objects having a cluster of properties are named as being members of a
kind. That label then affects the property cluster that they have,
which changes the classification, and so on repeatedly, with human
interests changing the properties that get classified into the
category. Hacking discusses the example of the kind refugee,
in which categorizing people as refugees changes how they are treated,
which then loops back to affect how we categorize refugees. In
Hacking’s account, each loop includes a mentalistic
aspect—the classification—and an instantiated
aspect—the causal effects on the properties. Butler 1993 and
Hayles 1999 develop accounts of the looping effects of classification
systems on human bodies (see also Schilling 2001). Mallon (2003, 2016)
combines the looping theories with homeostatic property clusters, and
applies them to social kinds, races in particular.

4.4 Theories of Practice

A different large class of theories hold that practical engagement
with the environment is the basis for the setup of social categories.
Many of these theories are influenced by Heidegger 1927, Merleau-Ponty
1945, and Wittgenstein 1953. And still other theories are pluralistic
and heterogeneous: they hold that social categories are not just set
up in one uniform way, but in a variety of distinct ways.

Theories of practice were discussed in
section 3.2.4,
as theories of the constituents or parts of social phenomena. Dances,
for instance, involve physical and mental routines: among the
constituents of a cha-cha are people’s thoughts and actions on
the dance floor. However, theories of practice are not so easily
categorized. Particular tokens of dance routines might be understood
as playing a dual role: not only are they the constituents of
cha-chas, but they also are among the sources of the category cha-cha.
In this respect, theories of practice share an insight with certain
“pattern” theories (see sections
4.3.2
and
4.3.3):
the tokens of the practices themselves do some of the work in
structuring the social categories into which the practices fall.
Giddens (1984) gives an account of what he calls
“structuration”, the process by which social structures
are dynamically generated by practices and also condition them.
Sahlins (1981, 1985) describes the formation of cultural categories
through collisions between cultures and the actions of individuals.
Other theories as well, such as Foucault (1976, 1977a) and Geertz (1973) can also be
understood as giving accounts of how practices set up social
categories.

Because practices are so general and play so many roles in these
theories, it is a challenge to interpret them from the perspective of
social ontology. It is hard to tease apart different kinds of
ontological claims they make, and also hard even to know when these
theories are making an ontological claim, as opposed merely to telling
a narrative of causal influence. Some theories of practice insist on
the importance of material routines in the world, and yet return to
mentalistic-sounding accounts of the conceptual creation of the social
world. The centerpiece of Bourdieu 1972 [1977], for instance, is the
claim that social practice is generated by a
“habitus”—a mentally internalized system of
discrimination and perception, embodied as dispositions. (See also
Ortner 1984).

4.5 Pluralistic and Heterogeneous Theories

As seen in the “pattern theories” discussed in
section 4.3,
approaches to biological and other scientific kinds are sometimes
extended to social categories. Some participants in these debates,
including Dupré (1995) and Hacking (2007), argue for a sweeping
pluralism about scientific kinds: they contend that there are myriad
kinds of kinds, and that it is an error to regard some kinds as more
“natural” than others. Others argue for a more modest form
of pluralism. Ereshefsky and Reydon (2015) argue that there are
several distinct kinds of scientific kinds, including non-causal
kinds, functional kinds, and heterostatic kinds. Along similar lines,
many theorists of race argue for pluralism with respect to racial
kinds: though contemporary race theorists deny “biological
essentialism”, they argue that there are many ways racial kinds
are constructed and used in contemporary societies (see
section 5.4).

Epstein (2008, 2014a) argues
for modest pluralism about the ways social categories are set up. He
introduces the term ‘anchoring’ to denote the setting up
or putting in place of social categories or kinds. He proposes that
all the theories discussed in
section 4
are theories of anchoring, but denies that social categories are all
anchored in the same way. Instead, there are various “anchoring
schemas”. He cautions that we sometimes classify kinds according to
how they are anchored, but not in all cases.

In addition to pluralism about anchoring schemas, he also argues that
anchors are heterogeneous (Epstein 2015): even for a single anchoring schema, the anchors
that feed into that schema—i.e., the facts that metaphysically
set up a social category—are often diverse. Legal categories in
the U.S., for instance, are anchored by facts such as jury
instructions, trial results, legislative enactments, judicial
interpretation, and environmental regularities. Even theories of
practice, he argues, do not have the resources to accommodate this
heterogeneity.

4.6 The Roles of Language

Many theories in social ontology assign a central role to language. In
considering the relation between language and sociality, we should
separate the following questions:

Regarding the social nature of language: Is language private or
public, mental or social or environmental? This is discussed in
section 5.7.

Regarding linguistic entities as constituents of social facts: Do
certain social facts have linguistic components or building blocks?
For instance, a speech act may be a component of an instance of a
hate-crime. This is discussed in
section 3.2.3.

Regarding roles for language in setting up social categories: Is
our language part of the metaphysical explanation for why we have the
social categories we do, such as dollar, woman, or professor? This is
the topic of the present section.

Answers to this third question can, in turn, be divided into two broad
kinds of role for language: (a) social categories correspond to
semantic values, or meanings, of words; (b) social categories are set
up by speech acts, discourse, or other features of a community’s
language.

4.6.1 Social categories as semantic values

‘Cha-cha’ is a word in the English language (yes, imported
from Spanish). In some semantic theories, the meaning of that word
just is the social kind cha-cha: the semantic value of the
word is identical with the social category. This may or may not imply
that language plays a key role in social ontology. On a
direct-reference theory of meaning (see Soames 1987, Kaplan 1989,
Recanati 1993), it does not. That theory argues that we encounter the
kind cha-cha in the world—a kind that is presumably
socially constructed—and then connect the word
‘cha-cha’ to that kind. The inclusion of that word in our
language does not have any metaphysical bearing on the category.

The same may apply even if the name has causal influence on the
category cha-cha. Hacking 1995 argues that the term we apply
to a category has an influence on our practices, which in turn changes
the category. Even in this account, it is not clear that language has
a metaphysical bearing on the category: the practices ontologically
determine the contours of the category, and the uses of the word are
merely one among many causal influences on those practices.

But in other theories of meaning, the order of metaphysical
determination is reversed. Consider, for instance, a theory in which
word meaning is derived from patterns of usage—a theory, for
instance, in which the word ‘cha-cha’ derives its meaning
at a time from uses of that word up to that time. Or consider a
descriptive theory of meaning—a theory in which the word
‘cha-cha’ derives its meaning from the cluster of
descriptions that the English-speaking community associates with it.
If we add to these theories of linguistic meaning the further claim
that social categories are identified with semantic values, then it is
linguistic building blocks that set up the social kind
cha-cha.

There are grounds for skepticism about equating social categories with
semantic ones. Sociologists often discover social categories that have
not been previously named, spoken of, or even conceptualized. This
suggests that semantic categories may not play quite so central a role
in the metaphysics of the social world.

4.6.2 Social categories set up by speech acts, discourse, features of language

Austin (1961, 1962) points out that language is not only reserved for
describing states of affairs in the world. Certain utterances are
“performative”: merely in uttering them, we establish
facts in the world. A minister, for instance, marries a couple with an
invocation. Searle (1995, 2010) argues that all “institutional
facts” are generated in this way. Every constitutive rule, he
argues, is a product of a declarative speech act, although he
qualifies this by holding that some declarations may be replaced with
attitudes that have the same function (Searle 2010). He expresses
skepticism that, in such acts, we genuinely create new entities in the
world, rather than merely taking attitudes towards “brute
reality” (cf. Sider 2001, Effingham 2010). Thomasson (2003)
argues on the contrary for the reality of entities generated with
speech acts (cf. Wiggins 1980, Schiffer 2003).

Several theorists argue not just that particular social entities are
produced by speech acts, but that the social world is the product of
discourse more generally. This view has many historical antecedents in
the enlightenment and post-enlightenment (Aarsleff 1982, Ricken 1994,
and Forster 2010), as well as in the early twentieth century, such as
Cassirer 1925 and Whorf 1944. But Wittgenstein (1953) is generally
credited with crystallizing this “linguistic turn”. Winch
(1958) draws on Wittgenstein to argue that “our language and our
social relations are just two different sides of the same coin”.
Social phenomena and their meanings, according to Winch, are
manifestations of the “form of life” in which a
society’s language-games are a part. This perspective has been
influential in post-structuralism in particular, with a wide range of
theories advocating the linguistic construction of social reality.
Included among these are Foucault’s discourse analysis (Foucault
1984, 2001) and Butler (1988)’s treatment of the performativity
of gender, with the speech acts that would appear to express gender
actually being constitutive of gender identities. See Tannen, Hamilton
et al. 2015.

Recent theories in post-structuralism have begun to de-emphasize
language, partly as a result of critiques that such theories focus too
little on human bodies and physical experience. The notion of
“discourse” is also often expanded to include practical
activities in the world (such as the “architectural
discourse” of constructed spaces). Theories of discourse,
construed in this way, are difficult to distinguish from more general
theories of practice and heterogeneous theories.

5. Key Domains Addressed by Social Ontology

The preceding sections discuss general theories of social ontology.
Informing these—and informed by them—is work on specific
applications. The following sections briefly discuss prominent domains
in social ontology to give a sense of the variety of these
applications, to introduce some key topics, and to point to resources
for further reading. Corresponding to each these sections is an entire
subfield of philosophy and/or social science.

5.1 Social Groups

What are social groups? One debate in the literature concerns the kind
of entities that social groups are: collections, classes, sets,
fusions, structures, or some other kind of entity. It may seem natural
to think of a group as a set of people in the mathematical sense.
However, groups can persist through changes in membership, while sets
are generally understood as having their members essentially (see
Sharvy 1968, Ruben 1985, Uzquiano 2004, Sheehy 2006). Effingham (2010)
proposes an account that identifies groups with complex sets, so that
they can have different members at different times and at different
worlds. Others (including Macdonald & Pettit 1981, Copp 1984,
Sheehy 2006) argue that groups are fusions of people. A problem with
this is the transitivity of parthood: since Alice’s finger is a
part of Alice, it follows from the fusion view that if Alice is a part
of a group, then so is Alice’s finger. That is a problem,
because while Alice is a member of the group her finger is not.
Another view is that groups are realizations of structures: Schmitt
(2003a) considers and objects to this, and Ritchie (2013) defends it.
Others argue that groups are distinct from their members but are
constituted by them (Uzquiano 2004, Jansen 2009, Epstein 2015).

Different approaches to groups make different commitments with regard
to the entities that should be included among the social
groups—e.g., committees, teams, corporations, universities,
nations, races, genders, red-haired people. Some theorists also
propose that social groups must have certain distinctive
characteristics, such as the members being in certain cognitive states
or being subject to certain norms. Related to this is the question of
whether there are distinct types of groups. Ritchie (2015) argues that
there are two prominent types—organized groups, which
are realizations of structured sets of nodes that stand in a
functional relation to one another, and feature groups, which
are collections of people who have a property or feature in common
with one another. Thomasson (forthcoming) argues that an important way
of characterizing groups is in terms of the norms they bear. Epstein
(forthcoming) challenges simple typologies of groups and proposes a
framework for the metaphysics of groups involving multiple
dimensions.

5.2 Group Minds, Collective Intentionality, and Group Agency

Can groups take actions? Can they have intentions or beliefs? Can they
bear responsibility? If so, how are these to be understood? Through
much of the twentieth century ascriptions of intentions and actions to
groups were widely regarded as either erroneous or else merely
“summative”: that is, for a group to have an intention or
take an action is merely for all the members of the group to have that
intention or take that action (see Tollefsen 2015).

Schweikard and Schmid (see entry on
collective intentionality)
find more nuanced approaches in Scheler 1913 and Walther 1923.
Scheler identifies various kinds of social entities, some of which
involve people acting in solidarity, and Walther proposes an account
of structured attitudes in terms of empathy. In the recent literature,
Gilbert (1989, 1990) introduces new reasons for denying summative
approaches: members of social groups are subject to norms that do not
apply merely to individuals who have matching attitudes. If a couple
is walking together to the store, one person violates a norm if she
suddenly takes off in a different direction without excusing herself.
But this would not violate any norms if collective intentions were
merely summative. Gilbert argues that social groups, as opposed to
mere collections of individuals, are formed by the members making
joint commitments. She describes the formation of such commitments,
and analyzes group attitudes in terms of them.

Bratman (1993, 2014) is more concerned with demystifying shared
intentions by explaining how they can arise from individual attitudes.
Instead of searching for a general analysis, he proposes sufficient
conditions for the formation of shared intention, as applied to the
case of “modestly social” groups. These are small,
unstructured groups of people, in which all members participate
knowledgably in coordination with one another. Bratman analyzes shared
intention in terms of the common knowledge of group members, together
with “meshing” intentions by group members to perform an
action by way of the actions and plans of the other members. Bratman
argues that the norms Gilbert observes can be derived from these
interpersonal intentions together with standard moral obligations.

Tuomela and Miller (1988) and Searle (1990) account for group
intention differently. Following Sellars (1968, 1980), they propose
that there is an overlooked class of attitudes that individual people
possess: in addition to “I-attitudes”, individuals also
have “we-attitudes”. According to Searle, these are
distinct primitive mental states. For a group to collectively intend
J, according to Searle, is for all the members of the group to
we-intend J. His view is somewhat similar to a “summative”
view of group attitudes, except that collective attitudes are sums of
we-attitudes rather than I-attitudes. Tuomela and Miller also
distinguish attitudes in the “we-mode” from attitudes in
the “I-mode”. The most unified form of group attitude, in
their view, is made up of the members having we-mode attitudes. But
for Tuomela and Miller, we-mode attitudes are not primitive, but are
built out of more standard attitudes. They also admit different
species of group attitudes, some of which are built of I-mode
attitudes of group members, much like Bratman does. In recent years,
psychologists and cognitive scientists have begun to investigate
whether there are distinctively social attitudes (see Knoblich,
Butterfill et al. 2011, Gallotti & Frith 2013, Tomasello
2014).

In addition to collective intentions, other philosophers have worked
on the analysis of other attitudes, such collective belief and
judgment (Gilbert 1987, Wray 2001, Hakli 2006, List 2014).

The analysis of collective attitudes raises questions about the nature
of group minds more generally, and whether or not they are to be
understood as extensions of individual properties applied to groups. A
number of theorists take a functionalist approach to group minds and
agency. On this approach, group agents or group cognitive systems are
understood to function in a similar way as individuals do, at a
certain level of description. A widely accepted theory of individual
agency is that people have a modular system that we use to navigate
the world. We have beliefs, knowledge, form intentions, plan, reason,
and take action. All of these components can be described in terms of
their functional contributions to the system, and they integrate with
one another to perform unified functions. They compose, in other
words, a “system of practical activity”. Group agency is
understood on this model: for group agents, the same functional system
is realized, but by groups or distributed systems rather than by
individuals. (See Bratman 1987, 1993, 2014; List & Pettit 2011; Theiner &
O’Connor 2010; Theiner 2014; Epstein forthcoming). List and
Pettit argue that such realizers constitute new “loci of
agency”, or “groups with minds of their own”.

Others challenge group minds by arguing against functional treatments
of mind altogether. Rupert (2014), for instance, argues that having
phenomenal states is a requirement for intentionality, but that groups
cannot have such states (see also Schwitzgebel 2015, List
forthcoming). Other theorists object to the typical focus of this
literature on small unstructured collectives of adults interacting
with one another. They instead work on the attitudes of complex
groups, corporations, and large-scale systems (Hutchins 1995, Huebner
2013). Questions of moral agency and corporate
responsibility may also bear on how to analyze group agency and group
minds (see French 1979, Tollefsen 2002, Pettit 2007, Hess 2010, List
& Pettit 2011).

5.3 Institutions, Organizations, and Firms

The nature of institutions, organizations, and firms is treated more
extensively in sociology and economics than in philosophy. Coase
(1937, 1960) pioneered the literature on firms in economics. In
“The Nature of the Firm”, Coase examines the question of
why firms exist at all: he argues that the function of firms is to
lower transaction costs that would otherwise have to be incurred in
forming contracts among individuals. Coase does not distinguish the
question of the function of firms from the question of what firms are.
But subsequent work engages more directly with ontological questions,
including eliminativism about firms (Alchian & Demsetz 1972), the
“nexus of contracts” view (Jensen & Meckling 1976),
the “property rights” view (Grossman & Hart 1986, Hart
& Moore 1990), and the “resource view” (Penrose 1959,
Barney 1991, Conner & Prahalad 1996).

Work on firms is also tied to theories of in institutions in
economics, spearheaded by Oliver Williamson, Douglas North, and Elinor
Ostrom. Williamson (1979, 1981, 1996) popularized a Coase-style
approach with theories of how institutional structures such as
markets, hierarchies, multidivisional corporations, and alliances
solve problems of transaction costs. Ostrom’s influential work
on common pool resources treats institutions as sets of rules that
communities put in place in order to change incentives and to induce
socially beneficial choices. The “new institutional
economics” program develops this largely game-theoretic
understanding of institutions, tying them to analyses of the nature of
conventions and norms (see Shepsle 1986; Sugden 1986; North 1990;
Ostrom 1990, 1995; Binmore 1998; Schotter 2008; Guala 2016).

Recent work in organizational sociology also focuses on systems of
rules, with organizations analyzed in terms of their
“institutionalized” features. Rather than the explicitly
chosen rules discussed by economists, however, here systems of rules
are regarded as tacit and non-intentionally followed (Powell &
DiMaggio 2012). Sociological approaches have been developed for
interpreting organizations, largely focused on causal explanations for
their structure, power, and influence. Work on the nature of
organizations in sociology often involves analyzing them in terms of
social components or properties (see Clegg, Hardy et al. 1996, Scott
2014).

5.4 Race, Gender, and Disability

Much recent interest in social ontology has been sparked by new
approaches to race, gender, disability, and related social categories.
Historically, erroneous ontological claims have contributed to and
been used to justify social oppression. Claims about the genetic
nature of race, for instance, are historically tied to claims about
intellectual, character, and cultural differences between racial
groups. Likewise, claims about the nature of gender differences are
historically tied to claims about how women ought to behave.

Controversy over race categories, gender categories, and other
categories, pertains both to their construction and their essential
properties. The term ‘essentialism’, as applied to
categories such as race and gender, has a different meaning than it
does in mainstream metaphysics. As applied to race, for instance,
‘essentialism’ is often understood as synonymous with
‘biological essentialism’—the view that races have
simple, natural, and heritable biological properties, such that every
member of a racial group has that biological property. This should not
be confused with a metaphysical claim that might be made by a social
constructivist proposing a “social essence” of race: for
instance, a claim that membership in a racial group essentially
involves identifying with other people for reasons of solidarity, or
that it involves being descended from a historically and
geographically situated population. Such a theorist would flatly deny
“essentialism” in the old sense, which still analyzing the
(socially set up) essential properties of race (for a critique of
essentialism, see Phillips 2010; see also entry on
race).

Eliminativists argue that biological essentialism in the old sense is
inseparable from our racial categories, so debunking racist views
implies that racial categories are an illusion: there are no races
(Appiah 1985, 1994; Zack 1994, 1995). A different set of approaches
maintains that races are social kinds without having simple biological
essences. Among these are historico-geographic theories,
genetic-bundle theories, identity theories, etc. (see Bernasconi &
Lott 2000, Zack 2002, Glasgow 2009). Other theories hold that although
simple biological theories are false, racial differences can be
identified using the methods of population biology (Andreasen 1998,
Kitcher 2007, Hardimon 2012; see also Kaplan & Winther 2014). In
the face of competing conceptions of race, some theorists propose
pluralism about race-like kinds (Hochman 2013, McPherson 2015). In
many theories of race, bi-racialism and multi-racialism have been
treated as boundary or marginal cases. Others argue, on the contrary,
that multiracialism is central to the construction of racial
categories (see Alcoff, Sundstrom et al. 2016).

In some ways, questions pertaining to the metaphysics of sex and
gender resemble those pertaining to race: historically, descriptive
and normative categories were conflated in simplistic biological
theories. An important difference between sex/gender and race,
however, concerns the distinction between sex and gender (Beauvoir
1949, West & Zimmerman 1987). Many theorists propose that sexes
are biological categories and that genders are categories of social
norms and behaviors that are traditionally attached to sexes. However,
other theorists argue that it is incorrect to regard sex as biological
(Fausto-Sterling 2000, Butler 2004). Thus in the case of sex/gender,
there are arguably multiple socially constructed categories that
interact with one another; and some theorists reject the distinction
between sex and gender (see entry on
feminist perspectives on sex and gender).

A question pertaining to racial and gender categories alike is whether
these are descriptively adequate categories in the first place. Many
of the political phenomena associated with differential treatment of
groups and oppression cut across lines of race, gender, and class.
Some theorists of intersectionality argue that it is misleading to
regard standard gender and racial groups as if they were unified (see
Crenshaw 1991, McCall 2005, Jones 2014).

A central problem in the ontology of race, gender, and other
categories is that how we categorize not only has ethical
implications, but is affected by ethically-laden facts. Some theorists
challenge the idea of a purely descriptive analysis of such groups.
Others propose that there can be descriptive analyses, but that such
analyses are a stepping stone to ethically preferable categories.
Haslanger (2000, 2012) in particular has argued for the
“ameliorative” analysis of racial and gender categories.
Part of the role of social ontology is to analyze the concepts and
categories that are “operative” in a social system, but an
equally important aim is to explore how we might otherwise construct
social categories with the aim of social improvement. Barnes (2016)
argues for an ameliorative account of disability (see entry on
disability: definitions, models, experience).

5.5 Artifacts and Artworks

The term ‘artifact’ denotes a broad class of objects that
are products of human activity. The paradigmatic examples are tools,
such as hammers, knives, and cups, but the category of artifacts
includes more complex objects as well, such as cars, houses, and
computers. Some theorists conceive of artifacts broadly enough that
the category includes nearly all social entities, from hammers to
Hamlet.

The standard rough characterization of an artifact is that it is an
object created by people to perform some function (see Hilpinen
1992a, Dipert 1993; entry
on
artifact).
This characterization excludes objects that are used to perform
functions but are not made by a person. A rock might be used as a
hammer, or a piece of driftwood as decoration. Other objects are made
by people but without any functional intention, such as scraps of
metal produced in making a blade. The functionality of an object can
also be de-coupled from its making: someone might, for instance,
decide that an unmodified pile of scrap metal is sculpture.

This definition requires an understanding of the role—and
perhaps the necessity—of intention. Many objects that we presume
to be artifacts are not accompanied by human intentions directly. A
machine, for example, might automatically hammer out thousands of
blades, which the machine stacks into boxes. A particular blade in one
of those boxes would typically be considered an artifact even though
no human was ever aware of that blade’s existence, to say
nothing of having created it for a reason. Millikan (1984) argues that
certain entities can be understood as having “derived
functions”, when their intended role is part of the explanation
for their being reproduced. Thomasson (2003, 2007) develops this idea
further, arguing that the function of an artifact is always in
principle knowable to the creator. Elder (2004, 2007) develops
Millikan’s approach in an opposing direction, arguing that
artifacts are copied kinds but need not be accompanied by creator
intention.

These and other accounts hold that artifacts ontologically depend on
historical facts, often historical intentions of the creator. Others
argue that the emphasis on historical processes is misguided, and that
what matters is how an object is used in the present (Keil, Greif et
al. 2007; Preston 2009, 2013). Not everyone agrees that artifacts must
have a function (or an intended function). Objects such as doodles and
rock stacks are created without either functions or functional
intentions. Even if artifacts necessarily involve functions, the role
of functions in distinguishing artifactual kinds from one another
might be debated. It may be that artifactual kinds are individuated by
function, but many artifactual kinds (such as houses) seem to have
multiple functions, and some sets of distinct artifactual kinds (such
as bicycles and tricycles) may all have the same function.

Theories of artifacts draw from the literature on the ontology of art
(see, for instance, Bloom 1996, Levinson 2007), and many theories of
artworks regard them to be kinds of artifacts (see Eaton 1969,
Iseminger 1973, Hilpinen 1992b, Thomasson 1999).

5.6 Money

Menger (1892) tells a story of the emergence of money from trading
practices. For a society to come to have money, Menger argues, it is
not required that anyone in the society made a choice to adopt a
medium as money. Instead, in the course of transactions in the
marketplace, the marketability of certain goods will tend to increase,
and as a result, these goods acquire a degree of
“money-character”. Money, in Menger’s view, is
simply a good that is highly marketable in transactions, and therefore
highly liquid.

The centerpiece of Menger’s account is the non-intentional
emergence of money (see Aydinonat 2008, Tieffenbach 2010). But his
account also gives an implicit theory of the nature of money. Money is
a simple causal-role kind, with any good that is highly liquid and
marketable being money. Introductory economics textbooks tend to
define money as a slightly more complicated role-kind: money is a
store of value, a medium of exchange, and a unit of account (Arnold
2008, Mankiw 2016). Recent work in economics suggests a different set
of functions for money. A striking feature of standard economic models
is that money seems superfluous. In idealized neo-classical economies,
there is no need for a medium of exchange, nor is it clear why price
levels should affect the “real economy” of production and
consumption. Thus economists have recently investigated the economic
“frictions” that make money useful, and find that money
contributes to efficiency in a market that has imperfect
enforceability of contracts and limited record-keeping. In such an
economy, money helps perform operations such as the search for trading
partners. The overcoming of such economic “frictions”
seems to be an alternative and perhaps underlying function of money.
(See Diamond 1984, Kiyotaki & Wright 1989, Kocherlakota 1998,
Wright 2010, Smit, Buekens et al. 2016.)

These discussions imply that money is a causal-role kind of some sort.
This is questionable, however: such a definition fails to accommodate
tokens of money that fail to perform those roles (such as a coin
buried in the ground). Instead, money may be better understood as a
different sort of functional kind, or perhaps as an artifactual kind
(see
section 5.5).
Alternatively, the nature of money may not involve its functions at
all. Aristotle (Politics 1.8–10) notes that there are
several distinct functions performed by money, each of which would
naturally have its own essence; but he points out that we use the same
medium for all of these. The money in any given society, he argues, is
a product of agreement in that society.

A story is sometimes told of a historical progression from barter to
the use of “commodity money” (such as gold, cowrie shells,
or beads) to the use of “fiat money” (such as
government-issued paper currency) (see Searle 1995, McEachern 2011).
Searle argues that all kinds of money are “institutional
kinds”, which he analyzes in terms of the collective assignment
of a function to a substrate. Commodity money, in his view, involves
assignment to a good with some intrinsic value, while fiat money
involves assignment to a piece of paper printed by the government.

Historians of money and monetary theorists divide kinds of money along
more nuanced dimensions. A few historical cases may qualify as fiat
money, such as in Ming dynasty China, revolutionary France, and the
American Confederacy, but these were fragile and subject to collapse
(Yang 1952, Ferguson 2008, Spang 2015). But many contemporary
approaches emphasize the role of private interactions in the creation
of money, and importantly, reserve banking as well as credit and debt
markets. Other theories emphasize the role of the state, and in
particular the central roles of interest-rate-setting institutions,
government debt, and the collection of taxes (see Friedman &
Schwartz 1963, Kaldor 1985, Moore 1988, Deleplace & Nell 1996). In
these approaches, questions about the “substance” of money
become rather peripheral.

Some controversies persist on the substance of money. It was part of
historical debates over the gold standard and
“bimetallism”, and more recently there has been
philosophical discussion of electronic money (Smith & Searle 2003)
and “cryptocurrencies” such as bitcoin. An ongoing problem
for work in the nature of money is the blurring of distinctions
between questions about ontology, about the evolution of money, about
what drives the money supply, and about what makes a monetary system
stable.

5.7 The Law

Many important questions in social ontology are connected to
jurisprudence, or the study of the nature of law itself. Consider a
given legal obligation or prohibition in a locality, such as a U.S.
federal law on reporting requirements for public corporations, or a
state law governing medical reimbursements. Lawyers and judges mainly
work on specific applications of such laws, such as whether a
particular corporation satisfying a particular reporting requirement.
In certain circumstances lawyers and judges investigate and interpret
the content of the law, such as whether some provision is incompatible
with the Constitution.

The study of the nature of law is distinct from these. It can be
divided into two principal inquiries, corresponding to the division
between the “constituents” and “sources”
discussed in sections
3
and
4.
The first inquiry examines what determines or grounds the content of
laws in general, within a legal system. For instance, is the content
of a law exhaustively determined by the statutes recorded in the legal
code? Or is that only a part of what determines the content of a law?
Other candidate contributors to the content of a law are historical
judicial interpretations, jury decisions, patterns of practices,
legislative actions and intentions, executive statements, general
legal principles, and moral principles. Hart (1961) casts this
question as the inquiry into the “rule of recognition” in
a legal system: that is, what conditions a proposition needs to
satisfy in order for it to be a law (see also Dworkin 1967, 1978,
1986; Greenawalt 1986; Shapiro 2007, 2009).

A second question is: What are the sources of these contributors to
the content of the law? In virtue of what do texts or enactments or
interpretations or moral considerations figure into grounding the
content of a nation’s laws? Positivist theories hold that social
practices and other sociological facts are the sources of legality;
natural law theories argue instead that legality is rooted in human
nature and that legal standards are independent of human decision and
practice. A central problem for any theory of the sources of law is
the authority, or bindingness, which law carries (if it does carry
these). See the articles in J.L. Coleman, Shapiro, & Himma 2002,
as well as entries on the
nature of law,
natural law theories,
legal positivism,
and
the economic analysis of law.

Other issues in the ontology of law pertain to the nature of entities
that pervade the law, such as contracts (Fried 1981, Barnett 1985,
Hart & Holmstrom 1986), promises (Scanlon 1990, Kolodny &
Wallace 2003, Owens 2006, Shiffrin 2008), and torts (J.L. Coleman
1982, 1983, Postema 2001). The law also plays a central role in
setting up certain social categories, such as marriage and
corporations. Marriage is tightly regulated by the law in many
cultures. Does the law define what marriage is, or is marriage set up
wholly or in part by social practices? Likewise for corporations: does
the law have a privileged role in determining what types of
corporations exist in a modern society, or are corporations products
of social and economic systems? (See
section 5.3.)

Social ontology also has implications for the practice of lawmaking
and adjudication. Theorists of corporate liability, for instance,
investigate the nature of corporate agency and responsibility, and the
relation between these and the agency and responsibility of individual
people connected to the corporation (French 1984, Fisse &
Braithwaite 1993, Erskine 2003, Gobert & Punch 2003, Pettit 2007).
The law is also often called on to adjudicate ontological questions,
such as whether goods of a certain kind fall under a clause of a trade
agreement, or whether a particular act is an instance of a
criminalized activity.

5.8 Language and Linguistic Objects

Much work in linguistics and the philosophy of language involves
claims and assumptions about the nature of linguistic entities, such
as linguistic rules, components of the language faculty, and semantic
content. Theories of the nature of language and meaning are also
influential models for the metaphysics of other social entities (such
as artifacts, institutions, and laws).

The most conspicuous debate about the “nature of
language”—namely, the debate over innateness—does
not have much to do with the metaphysics of language. Like most
phenomena involving the human mind, language is causally affected by
social factors. A person’s vocabulary and grammar, for instance,
are affected by interactions with parents, peers, and other community
members. Just how significant these causal effects are is widely
debated in linguistics, with many in the Chomskian tradition favoring
innate constraints on the mental structures of language and others
rejecting innatism (see Chomsky 1986, 2000; Tomasello 1992, 1995;
Elman, Bates et al. 1996; Kirby 1999). The question of the nature of
language, however, is to a large extent independent of innatism versus
anti-innatism. Interactions with other people may contribute only a
bit to an individual’s mental structures, or they may
fundamentally shape them—but in either case a person’s
language may or may not ontologically depend only on that
person’s brain states.

Chomsky (1986) does take an explicit position on the nature of
language and its ontological building blocks. He argues that
linguistics is the science of “I-languages”—i.e.,
internalized languages, the mental rules of grammar, phonology, and so
on, that individuals use in expressing themselves or understanding the
utterances of others. He rejects
“E-languages”—externalized or public languages like
English, Chinese, and Khosa—as unscientific fictions. Others
disagree on various grounds. Katz and Postal (1991) share
Chomsky’s view that each person has his or her own language, but
argue that languages are abstract or mathematical entities rather than
psychological ones (see also Higginbotham 1991). Wittgenstein (1953)
and his successors have a more substantive disagreement: Wittgenstein
denies the possibility of a “private language” altogether,
arguing that language is a matter of engagement of people with one
another and with the world. Other philosophers have argued for the
publicity and externality of language on a variety of grounds,
including the communicative basis of language, the nature of rules,
and theories of semantic content (see Kripke 1972, 1982; Schiffer
1972; Lewis 1975; Putnam 1975; Burge 1979; Brandom 1994; Dummett 1989;
and entries on
theories of meaning,
externalism about mental content,
names,
and
the normativity of meaning and content).

Theories of words, phonemes, and other linguistic entities are tied to
the metaphysics of language more generally, but also are subjects of
separate inquiries. The extent to which these are questions for social
ontology, rather than, say, the metaphysics of psychological states,
depends in part on whether and how language is public. Kaplan (1990),
for instance, argues that words are entities extended over time and
across a population: “utterances and inscriptions are
stages of words, which are the continuants made up
of these interpersonal stages”. This approach is in contrast to
type-token theories, some of which regard word-types to be socially
individuated, and others individualistically individuated (see Hugly
& Sayward 1981, Bromberger 1989, McCulloch 1991, Cappelen 1999,
Wetzel 2009, Hawthorne & Lepore 2011). The nature of words is also
tied to the question of whether a word’s meaning is essential to
it (Kaplan 1990, Alward 2005, Simchen 2012), and to the distinctions
between various types of words in linguistics, such as phonological
words, syntactic atoms, morphological words, and lexical words (see
Selkirk 1984, Di Sciullo & Williams 1987, Hall 1999, Raffelsiefen
1999, Julien 2007). Similar issues arise in connection with sentences,
utterances, and quotation (Davidson 1979, J. Bennett 1988, Washington
1992, Cappelen & Lepore 1997, Recanati 2001,
García-Carpintero 2004b, Predelli 2008, Saka 2013).

Speech acts make up another domain in which social factors are
plausibly constitutive. Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) argue that the
force of any speech act is a product of a social convention pertaining
to speech acts of that type. Others use an
“intentionalist” approach, in which the force of a speech
act is a product only of the intentions of the speaker. Yet others
argue that this force is a product of the uptake by hearers in
addition to speaker intentions (see Strawson 1964, Bach & Harnish
1979, Clark & Carlson 1982, García-Carpintero 2004a, and entries on
speech acts,
assertion).

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